Technology Reviews and Podcasts

The Prize At The Bottom Of The Kaby Lake

Last week, I discussed Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors and the disappointment that came from what we can probably call Intel’s laziest effort yet. It was more disappointing to me than when Post decided to remove Marshmallow Alpha Bits from our cereal aisles.

I was personally very excited for Intel finally releasing an unlocked i3 in the 7350K, and was even considering picking one up to play with…right up until the almighty Intel slapped us all in the face with a $180 USD/$250 CAD price point – the same price as the i5-7500.

However, there appears to be a diamond in the rough at the bottom of Intel’s new lineup that just may offer a glimmer of excellent value.

Enter the Pentium G4560.

Another first for Intel, the G4560 is the Pentium lineup’s pioneer for Hyper-Threading Technology. It comes with 2 cores/4 threads at a locked 3.5GHz clock speed with no boost, a 3MB L3 cache, and a TDP of approximately 54W. It even comes with Intel’s most recent HD Graphics 610.

The part that makes it truly interesting is the price: $65 USD/$90 CAD.

While the fixed clock speed means we can’t have fun pushing the chip to its utmost limits like we could with the legendary G3258, the performance results are actually quite impressive.

The G4560 hits well above its weight class, trading blows with Intel’s last generation i3-6100 (still priced at ~$150 CAD) and 2nd generation i5s. It also handily defeats AMD’s FX-6300, a popular processor for budget gaming PCs in recent years. At nearly half the price of the i3-7100 and only slightly less performance, one wonders if Intel might have shot their own entry level i3 in the foot.

There are also options for a tiny bit more power for a few extra bucks in the G4600 and G4620, but the G4560 has to be a top consideration for budget gamers going forward. While not having 4 physical cores may be a concern for future proofing, in the now, that value is hard to beat.

My only real complaint here is that Intel missed a great opportunity to call it the G4567 to satisfy my OCD.

Maybe one day we’ll get to see the unlocked version of this CPU. That would be a lot of fun to play with.